


Shadow War

by Tsubame



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Porn With Plot, Post X-Men: First Class, Post-X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Days of Future Past References, X-Men: First Class References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 14:28:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8671072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tsubame/pseuds/Tsubame
Summary: Erik has been having strange dreams, his memories of Charles playing out again and again in his sleeping mind. But then the dreams start to change, and Erik slowly realizes that something else is going on . . . that his dreams are only a front, and that Charles may be fighting a battle he can't afford to lose.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mm8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mm8/gifts).



> Happy Secret Mutant! I hope this fic meets with some small measure of satisfaction; I chose two of the possible prompts, but then everything went off in an odd direction that I didn't expect, and I just gave up on the reins and let it take me wherever it was going. And where it took me was . . . well, you'll see. I can only hope that it's a direction you'll enjoy.

Some part of Erik knew that this was only a memory, but he accepted it with the sanguine assurance unique to dreams. It wasn’t unusual for him to dream memories, after all, though they could more appropriately be called nightmares.

This wasn’t a nightmare.

Charles moaned and shuddered against him, both his hands braced against the wall, back perfectly arched. He was still fully clothed, but that bothered neither of them—his blazer was askew, the thick fabric pushed from his shoulders and sliding down his upper arms. Erik wanted it this way, wanted the layer of fine pale-blue cotton between his palms and Charles’ skin, as his hands clutched the flesh over Charles’ ribs, the solid handful of his pectoral, the hardness of his nipple even through the cloth. His neck was feverishly hot against Erik’s open mouth, his hair brushing against Erik’s closed eyelids. Erik worked his mouth over the skin, nearly mindless with urgency, pressing the flat of his tongue to whatever he could reach. Lifted his head, then went for Charles’ shoulder, wetting the cloth of his shirt, scraping his teeth over the fine fabric.

“Erik—” The consonants were a struggle; Charles’ head was back, now, leaning against Erik’s shoulder, and giving Erik the opportunity to run his hand up over the top button that held the shirt in its once-perfect vee, over the bump of Charles’ collarbone to the straining curve of his throat, the tendons in tense relief, the symmetry of his jaw roughened just slightly with the start of stubble. He shifted his other hand down to the bulge between Charles’ legs, and Charles cried out when he squeezed his fingers around him, the contact backing him against Erik’s own erection. Erik had not known until that moment how much he’d been waiting, wanting that; his hips jerked forward , and he used his grip on Charles to rub them together again and again, barely able to think.

“More,” Charles said, his throat rumbling and working under Erik’s hand. “More, more, more—“ it became a chant; he tried to take a hand from the wall, but it was impossible with so much of Erik’s weight pressed against his back in addition to his own. It left him falling forward on one elbow, and Erik’s head knocked against the wall as well, driving his teeth into cloth and Charles’ shoulder beneath it, making him yelp.

But it was enough for the telepath to free one hand to open the fastenings of his trousers; when their hands collided Erik realized what he was trying to do and made a clumsy effort to help. It was enough; together they showed Charles’ trousers and briefs down over his hips, and Charles had his hand around his cock, head thudding forward against the wall, Erik still draped over his back. That shift gave Erik enough presence of mind to open his own trousers, but only just. The relief of being freed from that constriction paled before the urgency of having his hands on Charles. Every moment away was a moment too long, because now he could run his hands over the runner’s girdle to where Charles’ hand was moving up and down, dry but not caring; it didn’t seem to matter.

Was that how it had been?

Charles was lost in the movement of his own hand, his hips moving in aborted stutters. Erik shoved his legs together and fitted the length of his cock between them and above the dangling waistband of Charles’ trousers. Then he was moving, too—they were at odds—but Erik moved faster, or Charles slowed, and Erik spat into his hand and pulled Charles’ hand away to replace it with his own. Then suddenly everything was right, _right_ , and Charles’ strong fingers were digging into Erik’s flank like a goad, they were moving together—

Erik came first, as intense as he remembered it, whiting out the world. At that point Charles took over for him, jerking and shuddering and then collapsing slowly against the wall. They both slid to the floor, Charles twisting and Erik unwilling to let go, until they came to rest in a heap on the floor. Erik remembered that it had been too cold against their exposed skin, but neither of them had had the wherewithal to do anything about it. Now, he knew it was cold, but it made no impression on him. He had his arms wrapped securely around Charles’ broad chest, and Charles’ heartbeat slowing to normal in his ear, and he cared not at all for the dampness of the blue shirt under his cheek or the air on his softened cock or anything else for that matter.

Charles was stroking his fingers through Erik’s hair, murmuring nonsensically, “There you are, darling, there, there, my darling.”

It was both ridiculous and utterly Charles. Erik raised his head to meet blue eyes—impossibly blue, no one had eyes like that, but that was how he remembered them—leaned in close, and nipped the still-flushed skin of his neck. Charles jumped and yelped, so Erik did it again, and again, and then Charles retaliated by digging his fingers into Erik’s sides, and then they were both thrashing and laughing, and everything else was forgotten.

They finally came to a stop more due to tiredness than anything else, Erik finally having pinned Charles beneath him, triumphant only because of his slight advantage in reach. At this point Charles had said something ridiculous about getting stains out of cotton-wool blends, and Erik had nipped him once more in retaliation, and then helped him up so they could return themselves to enough respectability to make it to a shower and a change of clothes. But instead Charles reached up and set his blunt fingers to Erik’s temples. “Thank you, my friend. I needed that.”

Erik felt his brow furrow as he frowned down into Charles’ suddenly serious face; this wasn’t how it had gone. And a second ago Charles had not looked so drawn, his paleness so pronounced, there had been no dark shadows under his eyes. “Charles, what—”

“—is going on?” he said to the warm, thick summer air. With a seamless transition he was walking along a street he knew in the old town of Buenos Aires, a string bag of vegetables in his hand, which he had to deliver—where? He had no idea, but still he was walking with purpose along the cobblestones, and this was sufficiently confusing that he woke up.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

And he would have forgotten about it entirely—who remembered their dreams, anyway? No matter how pleasant—except it happened again. And again.

It wasn’t just the times he and Charles had had sex, either, although there were a fair few of those. Sometimes he dreamed that they were sitting together, eating sandwiches out of plastic baskets in that one diner that was pure chrome Americana, the place Charles had insisted that they stop because “ _Look_ at it, Erik, just _look_.” Erik had wanted to keep going—they were almost to the prison where they would spring Alex from solitary, surely they could skip lunch. But Charles was insistent: “He’s in prison, he’s not going anywhere. Half an hour more isn’t going to make a difference.” So they stopped, and had typically American sandwiches, and Charles had stolen his pickle and Erik had let him. Charles had complained about the lack of vinegar on the table and Erik had laughed at him.

It seemed to Erik that he was often laughing in the dreams, often smiling, often twining his fingers through Charles’. Surely it hadn’t quite been that way, he never laughed so much—but these were all his memories, playing out one after another in his dreams. After a few weeks he realized that all the memories came from a decade before—there was nothing recent at all, not that strange confused moment when he’d first seen Charles again beneath the Pentagon, not from the chess game they’d played on the plane to Paris, none of the feelings of betrayal and anger and despair that had pumped through both of them. Instead there was the giddy job and wonder of discovering each other, one day at a time, camaraderie by day and impossible passion by night.

And then one night they were sitting across the chess board in the library of the mansion in Westchester, the fire burning merrily in the grate, the golden light coating everything in a warm glow. His martini was sharp and superb, heating his blood as he sipped. They were arguing, as they so often did, which always led to their best sex. For that reason anticipation was there, too, burning low in his gut, but it could wait.

Charles was saying, “Cuba. Russia. America. Makes no difference. Shaw’s declared war on mankind. On all of us. He has to be stopped.”

“I’m not going to stop Shaw. I’m going to kill him,” Erik knew the words by heart; this conversation had replayed itself in his mind’s eye so many times. He made his move, and remembered the certainty that had filled him in that moment, the sudden awareness of his triumph. “Do you have it in you to allow that?”

Charles moved forward to lean over the chessboard, studying it. Then all of a sudden he looked up at Erik’s face, his eyes widening. He sat up straight, looking down at the chessboard again. “No,” he whispered. “I’ve made a mistake. No.”

That had not happened. Erik felt his certainty waver; that hadn’t happened either. He knew what _had_ happened—they’d continued the argument and the game, Charles had excused himself, Erik had gone to his room alone and frustrated. “You’ve known all along why I was here, Charles. But things have changed. What started as a covert mission . . . tomorrow mankind will know that mutants exist. Shaw, us, they won’t differentiate. They’ll fear us. And that fear will turn to hatred.”

Charles was on his feet, pacing the carpet, his hand pushing back through his hair. “This is where it began. Right here. One wrong move. I lost my queen, and then I lost my king, and then I lost, and I lost, and I lost—”

Erik frowned. That hadn’t been the next line, that hadn’t been what had happened. The conversation was unraveling. He found himself trying another line from the script. “Are you really so naïve, to think they won’t battle their own extinction? Or is it arrogance?”

Charles stopped abruptly at his words; stooped, cradling his head, and laughed brokenly. “Arrogance. Yes. Hubris, the sin of pride. I’ve lost. _On rencontre sa destine /Souvent par des chemins qu’on prend pour l’éviter_.”

Erik was on his feet and beside Charles, one hand on the telepath’s back, the other on his arm, trying to get him to unbend, to look up. Panic was rising in his throat, choking him, and he didn’t know why. _Please, Charles, please_. “Peace was never an option.”

Charles lowered his hands and raised his face—older, suddenly, thinner and more careworn than the sleek creature he had been that night in the study a decade before, and his eyes seemed ancient, and so tired. “My strength and my weakness have always been the same. You, always you. But even so—even so. Even though I’ve lost. He’s clever, to have left such a clever trap. How could I not fall into it? I could never stay away from you.”

Charles was drawing him in, those eyes fluttering closed. He brushed their lips together, a faint, fleeting warmth, gentle as an apology, or a whispered farewell—

—and Erik’s arms were empty as he stood in front of the crackling fire in his memory, with the chess game Charles had lost standing silently by.

“Charles?” Erik whispered the word, and it seemed to disappear into the still air. The sound of the fire was fading, and shadows were gathering in the corners, growing. In the stillness the sound of wood against wood made Erik jerk back to look at the chessboard. The white king rocked once, then again, again—dread was clawing at Erik’s innards, a freezing numbness—it tipped further—

—fell, with a clatter in the silence, rolled once, and was still.

“Charles!” Erik shouted, and the shadows rushed in and drowned the room. Erik was sitting up in bed, panting and drenched in sweat.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Even then he would have forgotten about it, just another nightmare, but after that Charles disappeared from Erik’s dreams. Night after night he slept and awoke, he had nightmares and he acted out strange, nonsensical plays, and occasionally even saw memories playing out before his mind’s eye—but never any with Charles. And that wouldn’t have been strange, either, if not for how much he had dreamed of Charles before. Not to mention the constant knot of dread that he carried with him in his stomach, the absolute conviction that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

Finally, cursing himself for a fool the whole time, he packed his bag, gathered his passports, and headed for Westchester.

He had not seen the mansion in more than a decade, not since that fateful day in Cuba. It had changed since then, the façade altered, a wing added, the gardens partially remodeled. It had also fallen into neglect, to a degree that made him frown—but then, Charles had been much the same when he had come to the Pentagon on the barely-successful mission to release Erik from captivity. Mansion and man had mirrored each other as if one were an extension of the other; Erik was never sure which. Someone had been making an effort to return the house to its former state of refined splendor, but that work had clearly stopped. The windows were all dark, and everything was still, as if sleeping.

He decided that the simple, candid approach was most appropriate, set himself down on the front porch, and rang the bell.

It was no particular surprise when Hank McCoy answered it, predictably but always disappointingly brown-haired and bespectacled. It was probably for the best, though, since his track record with the furry version of Hank was not particularly good. But the last time he’d seen Hank the scientist had been supporting Charles’ weight across his shoulders, and Charles’ sure mental presence had been seeping inevitably from Erik’s mind, and the memory of that gentle loss and the fact that he felt nothing at all right now, along with all the rest, made him feel snappish. There was no point, then, in wasting time on pleasantries. “Where is Charles?”

Something complicated happened across Hank’s face—anger, resignation, relief, fear—flickering too fast, somehow everything other than surprise.  Finally he settled on calm and haunted, but with a deep tiredness underneath. “How did you know to come here?”

That made no sense to Erik, so he simply repeated himself. “Charles. Where is he?”

“Come with me,” said Hank, and walked inside with the clear expectation that Erik would follow.

Erik’s heels rang across the stone foyer, echoing emptily into the house beyond. It was both eerily familiar and entirely different, furniture moved and some of the doors widened, a ramp laid over a step, with the same combination of neglect and attempted partial repair that had characterized the façade and grounds. “Two weeks ago,” he said, as Hank led him to the elevator that had once led down to the underground bunker. “Did something happen?”

“Yes,” Hank said, his hands curling into fists. “How did you know?”

Erik scowled at the elevator door as it opened; as if on cue lights came up in the hallway beyond, which was longer than it had been before and with more doors opening off it. It sounded ridiculous to say it. “I had a strange dream.”

“A strange—“ Hank paused and stared at him, then his brow furrowed. “A strange dream. Yes.” He shook himself, then pushed open one of the blank doors. “He’s in here.”

Erik stepped inside and then froze. Beyond the door was a standard medical clinic, with simple sterile cabinets that held supplies, a bench padded in incongruously cheerful and bright vinyl, a counter and sink, and adjustable hospital beds that could be curtained off from the rest of the room. In the nearest of these lay Charles, pale as the pillow under his head, neatly tucked under a blanket with both arms arranged on top. There was an IV connected to one hand, a line that ran to a plastic sensor on his finger, a cuff that attached to numerous medical machines on his arm. A plastic mask covered the lower part of his face, and Erik had no doubt that the blanket drawn up to his chest probably concealed a catheter and other monitoring lines. A folding wheelchair was neatly tucked away behind one of the blocky machines on its little cart. Charles might have been sleeping, but Erik had been in enough hospitals to recognize a full life-support apparatus when he saw one.

“We were working late, two weeks ago.” Hank moved past him and around the bed, checking the bank of machines almost reflexively, making adjustments to the various lines and feeds although clearly none were necessary. Erik let his feet carry him over to the bedside, numb and shocked. “Charles wanted—wants—to re-open the school. We’ve had so much to do, to get everything started again. He’s been looking tired, but we’ve both been tired, there’s been so much to do,” Hank was repeating himself, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I . . . fell asleep, and I had this strange dream—I don’t remember that much—”

“Who remembers their dreams?” Erik said softly, staring down at Charles. The chestnut hair had been trimmed back from the long mane it had been in Paris, in Washington. He was clean-shaven again under the mask, and with his eyes closed he seemed strangely young. Far too still—even in his sleep Charles had never been so still.

“Except that Charles was in it. I think—I think I’d been dreaming about him a lot, for some reason. It sounds weird to say it. Mostly just—memories. But this was different, something happened—and then there was a crashing sound, and it woke me up. He had fallen—he must have been reaching for something, there were books and papers everywhere, he had fallen right out of his chair. He wasn’t breathing.”

The pump in the breathing machine was audible in the stillness, as was the scratch of the recording needle in one of the monitors. Erik reminded himself that he, too, needed to breathe.

“I had to resuscitate him. He wasn’t breathing, and his heart had stopped. Fortunately we were on the basement level. I brought him in here and got the machines set up . . . and he’s been like this ever since. In a coma, on life support. No brain activity. Nothing.”

Erik’s hands tightened on the metal rails of the hospital bed. He let his eyes close for a moment, a brief break from seeing Charles so still—still as death. His own lungs mirrored the slow rhythm of the breathing pump, as if he were breathing for the both of them. As if his breathing could keep Charles alive.

“Charles said . . . in my dream.” Erik cleared his throat. “I didn’t understand, but he said there was a trap of some kind. That someone— _he_ —had set a trap, and Charles had fallen for it, and lost—“

“—a trap, yes, that was it. I remember.” Hank’s eyes were focused on something beyond the bed, beyond the wall of the infirmary, trying to revive his own memory of a fading dream. “It was so disjointed, but I think he said—something about fighting someone? A battle, and he was losing. Is it possible. . . ?”

“Is what possible?” Erik met Hank’s eyes over the bed. Charles had always maintained that Hank was a genius _—“His mind is incredible, Erik, I can’t even describe it to you. He is capable of making the most astounding leaps of intellect, you would not believe.”_

“Telepathy—I’ve known Charles for a decade now, and I still don’t entirely understand how his power works. It’s more complicated than just when he—when he’s talking to you, or when he reaches out and freezes someone, or controls someone. And some of the way it all works is . . . we just don’t have the scales, the tools, the understanding necessary to describe it, to measure it. What if this is . . . something else? Another part of telepathy is, well—how do telepaths interact? What does it mean, to have one telepath fight another? What if . . . what if Charles is fighting another telepath, right now?”

“I saw Charles fight Emma Frost telepathically, in Russia.” Erik recalled that moment, the strangeness of it. “But there was nothing to see, at least not with my eyes. Although in a weird way I could feel—something. Like . . . surges, waves, pulses.”

“Could you?” Hank was examining him keenly. “That’s actually not surprising. We call your mutant ability metal manipulation—ferrokinesis—but Charles and I have theorized that it in fact goes much further, that it has much more comprehensive applications along electromagnetic lines. In effect, magnetokinesis. So it’s likely that what you were sensing then was the amplified neural oscillation of two telepaths in a heightened state of engagement—to sufficient extent that you were able to sense the activity.”

This was a perfect example of why Erik didn’t like Hank. He gritted his teeth. “I don’t feel anything from him now. And you said that you’re not picking up any brain activity.”

“But that makes sense. When Charles is using Cerebro, when Charles was fighting Emma Frost, when Charles uses his ability—for all of that he’s reaching out. Cerebro amplifies and projects his brain activity, increases the strength and reach of his Beta and Gamma waves, and produces—” Hank caught Erik’s gaze, swallowed, and stopped gesticulating. “—well, anyway, it’s complicated. When you felt him fighting Emma, you probably could sense it because his brain activity was occurring at a higher frequency than normal. But when a person is asleep—deeply asleep—brain activity drops to Delta levels. Current theory suggests that there may be more going on, and at even lower frequencies, than we’re currently aware of.”

“So you’re proposing—what, a different kind of telepathic battle?”

“One that occurs at the level at which we dream. No, _below_ that level. I think that’s what has been happening. Charles coming into our dreams—that must have been part of it, somehow. I don’t know how, I don’t even have the ability to measure what might be going on. But it stands to reason.”

 _Does it?_ But then, Hank had built Cerebro before he even knew telepaths existed, based on nothing more than a theory, a supposition, a possibility. _And it had worked._

“If this is true, then this telepath must be strong. As strong as Charles.”

“We haven’t yet seen two identical mutations, but yes, it stands to reason. Such a mutant would probably have similar abilities to Charles.”

 “Strong, and able to do everything that Charles can do—” Erik recalled Charles taking over his mind, wielding Erik’s power _through_ him, easily, utterly and completely irresistible. “—and perhaps everything that Charles won’t do.”

“If . . .” Hank swallowed. “If there was another telepath like Charles, trying to control people, to—Charles wouldn’t stand by and let that happen. Charles would fight.”

“Alone.” The word was terrible. “Emma Frost is dead. Who could fight next to him in a battle like that? Do you know of any other telepaths?”

“No. There’s no one who . . . wait. Charles was—he was reaching out to us, before he collapsed. Through our dreams. And these past few months, I noticed . . . he’s been reading about dream theory. Doing research. I admit I didn’t ask him about it, I’m not very interested in psychology, but he was telling me about dream symbolism, about the collective unconscious, about something he called the astral plane. I just thought it was . . . you know, just kinda hippie nonsense. He said that a closed mind was a scientific dead end.” Hank smiled briefly, an incongruous twitch. “But if he was coming to us in our dreams, the only reason I can think of that he would have done that is if it helped him in some way.”

“But how?” Hank spread his hands; Erik tightened his on the metal railings until he felt the bones creak. “He reached out to us. Can’t . . .can’t we reach out to him?”

“We’re not telepaths,” Hank murmured. “But what if . . . what if . . . what if we didn’t need to be? What if . . . all he needed was the channel? If we could connect to him again, psychically, then . .” With shocking suddenness Hank jumped straight over both bed and Charles without thinking about it, grabbing Erik’s shoulder and hustling him rapidly out of the infirmary and down the hall. “There’s a way, there’s a way to do it!”

Erik let him, pulled along by his exuberance, feeling a faint breath in his cold despair of something that reminded him of Charles. _Hope_. “How?”

Hank spun open the lock on the door at the farthest end of the corridor, and it parted ponderously and slid back into the walls. “With Cerebro.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

And then Erik woke up.

This place was nothing like what he had expected; it matched none of Hank’s sudden font of theories, expounded even as the scientist fitted the newly reconfigured interface for Cerebro over his head. Now that he was considering the possibilities, he was dredging up everything Charles had said to him, everything that he had heard. The astral plain was the collective unconscious. It was like the real world, but anything was possible. It was symbolic, imbued with meaning. It was a place of pure energy and pure intent. It was a palace of memories. It was the mind itself.

It was all of those things, and none of them.

Erik had moved Charles, bed, life support equipment and all, into the chamber of a rebuilt Cerebro. There was only one helmet, but that had fazed Hank not at all: “The helmet is just an easy way to hold the electrodes.” Instead of building another helmet, he had simply charted Charles’ skull with a red wax pencil and then glued the electrodes into their places, which looked only somewhat ridiculous when Charles’ brown hair flopped back over and obscured their placements from view.

Erik could feel them lying close against the telepath’s skin, the wires in them waiting for electricity’s wakening spark.

Hank had provided him with a chair, since he was at the wrong height to comfortably wear the helmet, and apparently likely to fall over. The scientist’s touch was both impersonal and professional, which strangely enough was a relief to Erik; his early experience as a lab rat had been very personal indeed, and this time he had done the insane thing and volunteered for the experiment.

 _For Charles_.

He reached out and gripped Charles’ hand, the one without the IV and monitor attached. Nodded to Hank, then fastened his gaze on Charles’ face, tired and yet serene beneath the breathing mask.

Electricity surged, and he fell—not outwards, thrown into the wider world of minds as Charles had once described to him, but inwards, into infinity.

And then he woke up.

He was walking down a street in Buenos Aires, in Zurich, in Washington, in Miami, carrying a briefcase, carrying a knife, carrying a folded coat, carrying a bar of bloody gold. There were echoes everywhere, a dozen languages, only half of which he spoke, all of which he remembered. He knew where he was going. He was following the trail, the trail that he had so painstakingly traced in red thread, in pencil lines, mapping the connections between people and places, between money and banks, between yachts and blood, between pig farmers and tailors. He was a hunter, and he always ran his quarry to the ground.

_“Where’s the telepath?” Shaw asked._

He was pinned to a mirrored wall that both drank the light and reflected it painfully. He knew his ribs were broken, and he breathed in short, painful pants even though he felt nothing. Shaw’s dead face was before him, as it so often was in his nightmares. “This is our time, our age. We are the future of the human race.”

“Everything you did made me stronger,” Erik said, “Made me the weapon I am today.”

_“Erik, please!”_

And then he woke up.

He was standing in the aisle of Charles’ jet, staring at the strange, burly man he vaguely remembered from ten years previous. _Logan_. “You’re going to find this difficult to believe but . . . you sent me. You and Charles. From the future.”

The future was a place of darkness, of shuffling, broken figures in collars, a place of despair. It was a place of slanted, golden morning sunlight, of running feet, of classics on the morning radio.

And then he woke up.

He was lying on green grass thick with cement dust, helmet encasing his head, blood roaring in his ears. He heard a voice, faintly, echoing in the confines of that strange metal, “I’ve been trying to control you ever since the day we met and look what that’s got us. Everything that happens now is in your hands. I have faith in you.”

And then he woke up.

Shaw was cradling his head, touching Erik with those terrible hands. “I’m so proud of you. And you’re just starting to scratch the surface. Think of how much further you could go. Together . . .”

_“Remember, the point between rage and serenity.”_

“Everything I did, I did for you. To unlock your power. To make you embrace it.”

It was too much, too much. The swirl of voices, the chaos, the monster of his memories leaning over him again and again—and somewhere a gentle touch, a single soft tear, the glow of candles, a sweet yielding, a kiss in the darkness—“You did nothing for me, nothing!” Erik snarled the words he had always wanted to say to the devil of his past. “What you did to me was for yourself, your gain, your purposes. You wanted to make my strength yours, but you can’t. I survived not because of you, but in spite of you. Now my strength is my own, to do with as I choose!”

Abruptly the chaos was gone; he stood on a vast space, tiled in black and white squares that curved off into infinity. Erik turned slowly in a circle, seeing nothing in all directions until the point where his eyes failed and the tiled space merged with the horizon.

“You have the first move.”

A scrape of heavy metal on tile, and Erik jumped out of the way as a giant chess pawn, larger than he was tall and as thick around as a tree trunk, slid across the board from one square to the next.

It had been Charles’ voice, directionless, disembodied. Erik took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He remembered those words from the plane to Paris; his opening move had been to bring his king’s pawn forward. He remembered the leather-upholstered seat beneath him, the smoky taste of the whisky they’d drunk, Charles across from him, haunted and unsure . . .

He blinked open his eyes to find the telepath in his seat, brows gathered as he stared down at the chessboard, one hand rubbing at his leg. And Erik did what he had wanted to do then—stood, stepped around the board, and straddled Charles in his seat; tilted his head backward and kissed him, rubbed his thumbs along the beard that framed his jaw. Charles made no move beyond opening his mouth, let Erik thrust his tongue in again and again. Erik couldn’t see, but the chest pressed against his midsection was also perfectly relaxed; those strong, blunt workman’s hands, so incongruous, must be lying yieldingly on the armrests.

That was good, but he wanted more, more. He shifted again and brought his knee between Charles’ legs, applying pressure against his groin even as he pinned Charles’ arms where they lay, pressed and then rubbed deliberately up and down until Charles whimpered and jerked his head to the side, breaking the kiss.

Now and with aching tenderness Erik kissed the arch of his cheekbone, the translucence of his eyelids, the noble line of his brow. “I want to help you, Charles,” he said softly. “I want to be whatever you have most need of.” He nosed his way into the overgrown brown hair to one ear. “Take my strength and use it.”

Slowly, Charles’ head came up again, and Erik drew back, set his hands on Charles’ shoulders. The telepath’s eyes blinked open slowly, that impossible blue.

“Are you ready for this?” Charles asked.

Erik felt a grin stretch over his face, mad and exuberant. “Let’s find out.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

There was a bird singing somewhere nearby, which was strange enough to make Erik open his eyes. He was looking at a ceiling, but it was one he recognized—it had been his room in the mansion a decade before. With an effort he moved his head, and saw that nothing had changed—it was just as hideous as it had been then. The only addition was the IV bag of clear fluid on its metal rack, dripping into the vein in his arm.

He took it with him and went to find Charles. This time it was much easier, since the telepath was in his room, which was a perfectly comfortable master suite and not hideous at all. Charles was neatly tucked into bed and reading some sort of scientific journal. The life support equipment was gone entirely, and a band-aid covered where the IV had previously penetrated. He still looked tired, but not so haggard as he had been. His wheelchair was tucked up on the other side of the bed.

“Hank has us both assigned to strict bedrest,” Charles said without glancing up. “Which you’ve preemptively chosen to ignore. The psychic backlash from the two of us completely destroyed Cerebro, which he’s taking remarkably well, but I think it’s wise not to jeopardize his continued good will. Not when he’s the one who’s cooking.”

“It was me or the wallpaper, Charles. One of us had to go.” Erik didn’t wait for an invitation but climbed into Charles’ bed. “Have you ever been in that room?”

“You know, I don’t think I have. You always used to come here.”

“Typical. Your own damn house, too.” Erik took the journal and flipped it onto the bedside table, answering Charles’ protest with a stern look. “I think you owe me an explanation, and I don’t want you lying here pretending otherwise. I seem to recall you saying something along the lines of never getting in my head again, which you clearly didn’t hold to.”

“I broke that particular promise in Washington not long after making it, as you probably also recall.” Charles sighed and started to rearrange himself to face Erik.

Erik did recall, and the shiver that it gave him was not the unpleasant sort. Unfortunately Hank’s prescribed bed rest was probably a necessary one, since he felt worn out merely from walking from his room to Charles’. It was inexplicable, maddening, and inescapable. All adjectives that he also associated with Charles. “Who . . . no, what were we fighting?”

Charles was quite for a moment. “He called himself the Shadow King. I don’t . . . it’s hard to be certain of more than that. I think—it’s possible that I’ve been fighting him my entire life, and only realized it recently. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell. He was strong, hideously strong in a way I’ve never encountered before.”

Erik tangled their arms and fingers together in the space between them, mindful of his IV. “But you defeated him.”

“Oh, yes. Or, well, I’m fairly sure. It can be hard to tell. But you understand why, don’t you? I mean, you were there.”

Erik did understand, in that he knew he understood what had happened not at all.

“Erik, I . . .” Charles was looking at their fingers. “I can’t thank you enough for what you did. The risk that you took in coming after me, diving into a battle you couldn’t possibly understand. I would have lost, you know. I had already lost. Until you came, I was lost. ”

“It was nothing,” Erik said.

“But the risk—”

“Charles!” Erik leaned forward and kissed the bridge of his nose. “It was nothing. You would have done the same thing for me—you did do the same for me, you noble fool.”

Charles frowned at him. “When was this?”

“Off of Miami. You don’t remember how we met? I’m insulted.”

“That wasn’t anywhere near the same.”

“It was exactly the same. Don’t you dare forget it, Charles Xavier. Because I won’t.” Agony and fury dragging him down into the crushing dark depths, despair and failure and death. And in the midst of it, strong arms wrapping around his chest, pulling him back up to the light.

“You’re not alone.”

**Author's Note:**

> With my thanks to whatever patient person typed up transcripts of XMFC and DoFP, to Jean de la Fontaine, and to my sister, who took one for the team so that I could make my deadline.


End file.
